Ms. Lambert most recently served as chief technology and innovation officer at National Grid and founder and president of National Grid Partners, directing $400 million in 43 startups that offer innovative approaches to managing supply and demand, increasing efficiency, improving response during extreme weather, and expanding EV charging capabilities. She achieved 7 exits in the portfolio for over $80 million in returns in the first 5 years of the fund and produced a 33% net realized IRR with 83% of the portfolio in a strategic engagement with National Grid. Her mandate also included standing up new businesses inside of National Grid as a part of their Innovation foundry. She formed 16 new companies that will contribute over $5 billion potential benefits via performance incentives, cost savings from smart operations, expansion to new technology and markets and will reduce emissions of over 14 million tons of CO2 emission projected per year across the portfolio, including via port electrification, transportation electrification, decarbonizing GT operations, and converting food waste into RNG. Lisa also founded the NextGrid Alliance, an alliance of 104 utilities across the globe to help accelerate the clean energy transition and facilitate engagements with the utilities and her portfolio companies.
Ms. Lambert was a Managing Partner at The Westly Group, a clean technology private venture capital firm based in Silicon Valley, where she was responsible for investments in software, internet of things, and energy technology companies. She closed several direct equity investments in companies such as Cognitive Scale and Paxata and sourced and/or closed key strategic LP investments. Prior to The Westly Group, she worked at Intel Corporation for 19 years and was Vice President and Managing Director of Intel Capital’s Software and Services Fund and the Founder and Managing Director of the $125 million Intel Capital Diversity Fund.
During Ms. Lambert’s tenure at Intel Capital, she led investments, incubations, commercial agreements, strategies, and innovation projects for Intel. She also managed an apprenticeship program designed to train high potential professionals in innovation and investment disciplines. Ms. Lambert led global investments in over 100 companies over her career at Intel Capital such as VMware (IPO), MySQL (acquired by SUN), Endeca (acquired by Oracle), JBoss (acquired by RedHat), Nexmo (acquired by Vonage), and managed a large organization of investment professionals. Ms. Lambert produced top decile returns, including seven IPOs and over 35 M&A exits and delivered operating returns through commercial agreements with strategic partners. Ms. Lambert has been a director on the board of several portfolio companies including most recently X+1 (acquired by Rocket Fuel), Silkroad Technology (on-going), and Brit+Co (on-going) for the Intel Capital Diversity Fund. She is also on the board of directors for the National Venture Capital Association (NVCA) and is co-chair of the NVCA Venture Forward initiative.
Ms. Lambert began her career at Owens-Corning as a software developer, and worked in sales, strategy, and business development roles. Ms. Lambert earned an MBA from Harvard Business School and a BS in Management Information Systems from The Pennsylvania State University.
